r/technology • u/ArgentineBeauty • 18h ago

Society Ukraine Struck Yandex Data Centers, Russian Bots Went Silent—Now Questions Are Mounting

https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/ukraine-struck-yandex-data-centers-russian-bots-went-silent-now-questions-are-mounting-23339
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u/Graymarth 17h ago

Honestly this just shows how short-sighted the development of these data centers in heavily populated areas has been. Take the data centers here in the US as an example, the grok data center in Memphis was the one that told the military to blow up that girls school in Iran, now that data center in the middle of a major city is a military target that if we ever end up in a war that comes to the homefront will probably be one of the first places to get blown up alongside the innocent people having to live near the damn thing.

If they want these data centers doing work for the military they need to put them on freaking military bases or away from society period.

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u/GenuinelyBeingNice 16h ago

data center in the middle of a major city is a military target

It is slightly relieving that data centers are not only HUGE (big target) but also veeery sensitive. A missile that can only destroy a small fraction of the area that the data center occupies, is enough to bring the entire data center offline.

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u/UltraLNSS 12h ago

A missile, or something much more accessible that no-gooders could build in their garage...

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u/GenuinelyBeingNice 9h ago

Is it a trebuchet? I hope it's a trebuchet.

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u/UltraLNSS 7h ago

I was thinking a giant slingshot but a trebuchet works too.

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u/LemurianLemurLad 10h ago

Yeah. That's just terrible right? Would be just awful if something small but critical were to get destroyed at a bunch of random data centers.

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u/Intelligent-Try-4738 15h ago

Your giving companies too much credit. There hasn't been a day in history where they've put people before profits.

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u/KornontheKolb 14h ago

Or it isn't short-sighted and we are meant to be human shields.

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u/Metalsand 14h ago

Honestly this just shows how short-sighted the development of these data centers in heavily populated areas has been. Take the data centers here in the US as an example, the grok data center in Memphis was the one that told the military to blow up that girls school in Iran, now that data center in the middle of a major city is a military target that if we ever end up in a war that comes to the homefront will probably be one of the first places to get blown up alongside the innocent people having to live near the damn thing.

I see people constantly get this wrong because they never read the actual articles. Grok is a crock of shit, but it was because of Trump's shitty administration that the mistake was made.

Picture a folder called "Iranian intelligence". No one ever actively culls the pictures inside based on time; if it's outdated intelligence, you'd catch that in a review before making a formal report. The only times you remove entries is if you update them.

The info they had on that building was 10+ years out of date in the intelligence folder, and wasn't even up to date with current intelligence assessments. Trump admin being who they were though, dumped all that info into Grok and said "give me iranian military targets" then directly forwarded that without context to military planners to tell them to specifically strike these targets, rather than ensuring verification was made of the targets. As shitty as Grok is (especially at the time, when this was it's mecha-hitler phase), US military intelligence procedure isn't exactly the bread and butter of the web scraping it will be doing...and it doesn't take a genius to consider that even beyond civilian casualties, it's probably worth the labor hours to validate targets before you launch a missile that could be $1-100 million against a target that provides no military value.

Even beyond that though - you can reasonably infer that the big failure in US intelligence that hasn't happened for decades* is probably in part due to putting morons in charge of everything. Particularly putting a jumpy grunt who feels the need to compensate in charge of secretary of defense.

* Technically speaking, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq wasn't a US intelligence failure because we learned after the fact that Cheney grossly misrepresented the data, and that our actual intelligence at the time estimated that they had some chemical weapons stockpiles, and interest in nuclear weapons but no capabilities. In turn, Cheney and GW Bush both had a soft spot about Iraq thanks to GHW Bush's pullout game, so Cheney had a very easy job getting Bush to back it.

TL;DR: Trump admin involving themselves sloppily achieves sloppy results. Grok catches strays, but fuck Grok anyways.

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u/Graymarth 13h ago

I agree with what you're saying but you're missing what I said, yes the military half hazardly dumped bad Intel into grok and didn't verify their target afterwards but it doesn't change the fact that this data center in particular that is in a major city was the one used to pick the target in the first place thereby turning that data center into a military target if we are ever attacked ourselves.

My point wasn't whether or not grok was good at picking targets or if the military had good Intel or not, my point was that using that data center to choose targets in the first place puts a big old bullseye on a population center.

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u/d3ssp3rado 16h ago

At least as far as the US mainland is concerned, power infrastructure is a much easier and more viable target. You can cripple local power distribution with a rifle and that also impacts data centers that don't have (illegal) on-site power generation. To disable the data center it's self you would probably need difficult-to-acquire explosives for a meaningful impact. So unless Mexican cartels start smuggling in RDX en mass, real bomb threats are unlikely.

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u/SamchezTheThird 16h ago

Short sighted or part of the plan. If an attacker ere to happen in populated places… our political history and stupidity take it from here.

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u/rattleandhum 13h ago

how short-sighted the development of these data centers in heavily populated areas has been

You're mistaken. Now if those data centres get hit, they can do what Israel (The United States, de facto) accused Hamas of doing when they literally destroyed every hospital, university, school, water treatment plant and farm. They're human shielding their tools of misinformation and control.

Same with Flock cameras. Destroying them will label you a terrorist.

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u/talonjasra 13h ago

Having a distributed data center in a proliferated low earth orbit might not be such a crazy idea after all.

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u/Emotional-Power-7242 11h ago

I mean factories producing weapons have traditionallly been military targets and those are all in major cities.

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u/vandreulv 10h ago

Honestly this just shows how short-sighted the development of these data centers in heavily populated areas has been.

I'm inclined to believe that this is less of an oversight and more of an acknowledged compromise.

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u/External_Key_4108 9h ago

It's intended, we're supposed to be meat shields

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u/mrbulldops428 7h ago

grok data center in Memphis was the one that told the military to blow up that girls school in Iran

Uhh....what? I missed that somehow, is that seriously why that happened??

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u/L4zyLightning 4h ago

If a foreign military is ever actively bombing US cities you have about 30 seconds to say goodbye to your loved ones. A lot of fireworks are about to go off around the world

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u/Tribe303 16h ago

If Trump were to physically invade Canada like he wants to, you can kiss your datacenters and electrical grid goodbye.... For example that is. 😁 

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u/Blah_Dee_Blah111 16h ago

That is a really good point.

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u/WhyAreYallFascists 16h ago

Dude, nothing in Memphis is getting blown up because of the Iran war.